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A World of Color

‘Titian: His Life,’ by Sheila Hale

If only Titian had left us the scathing letters and soul-baring sonnets of his contemporary Michelangelo, whose image as a tortured genius has enchanted biographers since the Renaissance. In their place we have just a smattering of Titian’s business correspondence and a few official statements. His friendship with the ferocious satirist and pornographer Pietro Aretino is the stuff of speculation. So too are his relations with the models and companions who appear in masterpieces like the “Venus of Urbino,” which transforms one of Venice’s highest-priced courtesans into a goddess of love, taunting us with her half-smile while resting her hand in a forbidden realm.

A void surrounds this artist who lived into his late 80s, painted more than 500 works and rubbed shoulders with kings and popes. He once described to his wayward son the “pain and distress, . . . sacrifices and sweat” he had endured to set him on the path to riches. Titian dictated these words to a scribe in 1568, a few years before he died; they represent perhaps the only raw emotion he recorded for posterity.

Sheila Hale’s “Titian” takes on the heroic task of reconstructing this largely undocumented life, but she devotes much of her book to other matters, especially Venice’s growing commercial empire. While meticulous and fluid, her account succumbs to a parade of forgettable patrons and politicians. A better title for a book that is too long by a third might have been “Titian and His World.”

At its best, Hale’s biography captures the energy and colors of everyday Venetian life as brilliantly as a Canaletto painting. The author of a well-received guidebook to Venice, she locates La Serenissima at the center of a global network whose spirit suffused Titian’s palette. In the haunting “Flaying of Marsyas,” one of Titian’s visual poesie (poems) based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Apollo’s removal of the satyr’s skin reflected a harrowing development in Venice’s foreign affairs: the flaying of the military officer Marcantonio Bragadin by Turkish troops in 1571. Yet Titian was too subtle an artist to sacrifice beauty in the metaphorical depiction of a current event. Hale points out that his Apollo, holding his knife “as though it were a painter’s brush,” radiates a delicacy and innocence at odds with his gory task. Perhaps the otherwise unliterary Titian was evoking Dante, who begged, as Hale notes, Apollo to “enter my breast and breathe there as you did when you tore Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.” This rare ability to fuse the political and the poetic explains why the European elite were so keen on commissioning a man who was, according to Hale, “the greatest portraitist of the ­Renaissance.”

Hale creates vivid narratives of Titian’s relations with his fellow Venetian artists and with the other creative titans of his age. She recalls the passage in Giorgio Vasari’s influential “Lives of the Artists” in which Michelangelo, after visiting Titian’s studio in Rome in 1545, praised the painter’s use of color but said it was “a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well.” She suggests that Vasari may have made up the remark to distinguish the clean lines and sculptural volumes of Florentine painting from the more freely drawn color-driven canvases of Titian’s Venice.

Titian was actually an accomplished draughtsman, as Michelangelo must have recognized. But by using blurred outlines, applying paint with his fingers, layering color for atmospheric effect and employing a palette so warm you can almost feel its heat, he stood apart from the more controlled and design-conscious Florentine school embodied by Michelangelo’s muscular women in the Sistine Chapel. Hale sums up the high stakes in Vasari’s dichotomy: Michelangelo, the master of Florentine disegno, painted the world as it should be; Titian, with his “Venetian spontaneity and use of color,” gave us the world as it is.

The image that emerges from Hale’s book is that of a sober brush for hire, more concerned with the bottom line than his — or anyone else’s — soul. Hale’s most arresting character is not Titian but Aretino, the subject of an extraordinary portrait in which Titian captures the crimson-robed “scourge of princes” (the poet Ariosto’s term) in all his robustness. Another sharply drawn figure is Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who became an important patron and unlikely friend of the Venetian painter. Hale charts how the militantly Roman Catholic Charles developed from someone with little aesthetic sense into a passionate connoisseur who died with his eyes fixed on Titian’s “Adoration of the Trinity,” a painting with enough spiritual intensity to have humbled even El Greco.

That Hale should have such trouble penetrating Titian’s veneer is no surprise, given the painter’s talent for concealment. A late masterpiece, the “Self-Portrait” from 1562, allows us a rare glimpse inside. Rendered in three-­quarter profile to accentuate his social standing, Titian stares ahead without meeting our eyes. He is dressed in a simple but expensive black doublet, topped with a white linen collar. His gold chain reflects the heights he has climbed from his modest origins in the rural Veneto, and his rheumy gaze is set in a determined stare, with none of the self-doubt that fills the mature self-portraits of a painter like Rembrandt, so beholden to Titian’s influence. Hale writes that the “Self-Portrait” appears to have been painted with no commission, “perhaps as an epilogue to a career that might be terminated by death at any minute.” It presents us with a man who is sure of himself but difficult to know.

Despite its length, Hale’s biography leaves much of Titian’s complicated personality in the shadows. Perhaps this is the way he would have wanted it. Always a step ahead of both patrons and public, he made his art available to the highest bidder — but, like the man himself, it never surrenders its mysteries.

TITIAN

His Life

By Sheila Hale

Illustrated. 832 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $39.99.

Joseph Luzzi, associate professor of Italian at Bard College, is the author of “Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy.”

A version of this review appears in print on December 30, 2012, on Page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A World of Color. Today's Paper|Subscribe